


The Pattern of All the Process

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: 15000-25000 words, Community: lgbtfest, FTM, Future Fic, Multi, Post-Canon, Transgender, Transsexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-25
Updated: 2009-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-04 19:51:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>At the Emergency Room the doctor calls Huck 'your brother'. Molly doesn't bother to correct him, neither does dad, not at first anyway, though she does wonder -- not for the first time -- why, with her short hair and dungarees, she never gets mistaken for a boy anymore.</em> A transition story. (Huck is FtM.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pattern of All the Process

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2009 lgbtfest on LJ to this prompt: 'any fandom with twins, Any set of twins, They've always been exactly the same and liked it that way. How do they deal with the realization that one of them is LGBT (author's choice) and the other isn't?' The title is from Havelock Ellis: "The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life" though I daresay this isn't quite what he meant by it.

i.

CCNY, New York, 2022.

Huck Ziegler, with his slicked-up pompadour quiff and check shirt in blue and silver-grey, looks to Stephen like something out of a mid-period Morrissey video. And to know that Stephen Ellman -- broad-shouldered, a postgraduate student with dirty blond hair, a casual baseball star -- thinks so would please Huck: underneath the shirt is a worn-thin Smiths tee. And of all the guys Huck has seen around campus (sitting in the bleachers composing poetry) Steve is the one who has stuck in Huck's head.

CCNY attracts a lot of guys who create sparks in Stephen -- band guys with drainpipe jeans in black and silver; the NewEmo kids with black lipstick and shirts with black collars and cuffs, drumsticks poking out of their back jeans pockets; the suits, or proto-suits as Stephen thinks of them, sharp to their edges like they put themselves away at night in a carry-case instead of going to sleep in a real bed. They all mesmerise him. And it seems like here, unlike at home, no-one could give a fuck if he's straight or gay or bi or pan or a, or that he likes to wear scarves until well into the summer, that he still feels like he's faking it on the baseball field -- like every good pitch is a fluke -- because back home they never let him come in from the outfield.

He's too old to feel this way, this flush of freshman-esque infatuation with place and freedom. This is grad school after all, he's meant to be an adult -- mark papers and grade assignments and be there for the kids when they ask dumb questions. But though he's twenty-six, Stephen feels eighteen and finally enfranchised, and surrounded by beautiful men who accept the fact that though he doesn't 'look gay' he's still a guy who sleeps with guys, as well as their good relief pitcher. And if anyone calls him a cocksucker, they more or less mean it as a synonym for 'dude'.

There is something in the flickers of their youth (that bright cruel intensity) that attracts him, and repels him. Too many sharp edges. In Huck those edges have been dulled, or were never sharp at all. He's like something from a black and white movie, a British one maybe, full of tender-faced young men who you think will disappear into two-dimensional space if they turn to the side so flimsy are their holds on reality. Huck carries a notebook, all the time. His hair turns into a spun-out cloud in the wind, a black thing, promising rain. Stephen can't look away from it.

They meet -- or first share space together -- in Stephen's 401 class on Twentieth Century American Poetry where, as a T.A. his role is to sit at the side of the well-loved professor and try not to doze off. That Huck is only a Junior has been no barrier to his entry, and Stephen, from his position of infatuated bias, thinks he writes the clearest and most beautiful prose on offer among the members of the class. But he is quiet, reticent even, like he's not sure he belongs here. So far it's the only fault Stephen has found.

*

The first time they speak it is Stephen's lame excuse for a real conversational opener that breaks the post-'So how 'bout them Metaphysical Poets?' dialogic lag. 'Ziegler' isn't that common a name and Stephen has had trouble forgetting the seemingly unremarkable professor who came over from Columbia to talk applied political theory, New York City voting patterns and student activism last semester. Stephen remembers the slicked-back hair at his temples that glistened two inches' length on either side of his skull in the yellow auditorium lights, and the low, gentle, insinuating voice Toby Ziegler used. That buzzed in Stephen's head.

Huck Ziegler is dark, like Toby was; his shoulders have the same rounded circumspection that looks almost sullen at first sight but later seems shy; humble. Huck's hair, when it grows a little too long in back, curls into tight corkscrews low on his neck. Toby Ziegler's curls were unruly last semester, running over his collar. Professor Ziegler grasped the podium unnaturally, uncomfortably and Stephen, who was sitting in the front row, noticed his blunt fingers and short nails that looked bitten-down. Huck's are exactly the same. Exactly.

And then there was the small amount of digging that Stephen did -- Google, Facebook, the bios on the back of Toby Ziegler's books. They mentioned a wife, and two children, of whom there were no pictures.

Stephen takes a breath, and says:

"Your dad's Toby Ziegler, right?"

Stephen has never seen a guy react so physically to one name before. Huck stills. He becomes heavy, and slow. His cheeks flush. He meets Stephen's eyes with what looks at first like nervousness, then like terrible weariness. Stephen sees a dozen responses, from the defensive to the dismissive, pass across Huck's eyes. All he actually gets, however, is a curt nod.

"Sorry. I just ... I figured he was your dad."

"Yeah. He's my dad."

"That's ... I mean, he's really, uh, cool. I heard him speak last year, that lecture at Columbia?"

Stephen curses himself, his diminishing vocabulary, the blush he knows his starting under his jaw. It's just that Huck is a quiet, intense presence, pouring into the space between their two bodies a silence Stephen feels compelled to overwrite.

"Yeah."

"He really can write."

Huck smiles; or the left corner of his mouth turns upwards a few degrees, enough for Stephen to label the twitch as a smile. He doesn't look proud though, pleasure only sparking in him at a distance; small fire in his eyes.

"Yeah," Huck says.

"I bet that was some fun when he looked over your homework, right?"

Huck chuckles; a sound like water running in a dark place to Stephen. "Yeah. That was fun all right."

"I bet," Stephen says, redundantly.

"So, you had fun at his lecture, huh?"

Stephen notes the _his_, and how Huck's voice slips over it so softly; how he sounds like Stephen remembers Toby Ziegler sounding at the podium, just for a moment -- quiet but with a lot of power behind it; the potential for storms and raging, deftly hidden. Huck is smiling, and now Stephen is running metaphors for dazzlement around in his head. Huck's eyes that are ordinarily so dark are gleaming now, little star systems twisting.

"Yeah. He -- _it_ was really great. Really interesting."

"Did he talk about activism, and how everyone does it all wrong these days, on the internet and everything?"

"Actually, uh, yeah."

Huck grins. "Familiar story."

"Yeah?"

"My dad was a child protester. A really proud child protester."

Stephen laughs; Huck laughs.

"He was really great."

Eyes meet, there are sparks and the faintest whiff of possibility like ozone in the air. Stephen realises that he is staring at exactly the same moment that he realises that he has run right out of applicable imagery. The sparks coming off Huck's smile scorch his skin -- a sparkler held too close to the face. Stephen wants to lean in and kiss him, right there, take up the moment and click it between his fingers, like magic. But Huck's eyes move away, and he adjusts the rucksack hanging off his left shoulder. In a second he is going to say something like --

"Anyway, I have to go."

"Sure. Okay."

"I'll ... I'll see you, Tuesday?"

Stephen nods, hopes he looks cool, aloof, not like he is waiting for Huck to leave so he can start with the hyperventilating.

"Tuesday."

"Okay."

"Okay."

*

Toby Ziegler keeps a single memory of his second child -- Huck, who arrived eight minutes after Molly -- close and curled-up in his heart. It beats heavily, every now and then, as his pulse does when he has taken the stairs too fast. A twist of gristle, an immovable block.

They were both close, dark children but around their sixth year something happened to Molly that had no corresponding occurrence in Huck. Dawn broke in Molly and the glimpses of the brightness, the strange rainbow that she would occasionally become at home, with Andrea, running up trees and around the Bay in Baltimore with Huck, broke out into the open sky. Bittersweet for Toby, since that is the time he feels he stopped understanding her; but harder for Huck, Toby thinks, since darkness always curled around the kid, easy and slick, the kind of darkness that gets thicker without company. There is a legacy there: a bright May day, an empty kitchen in a last-chance house, the oil slick of Ziegler DNA spreading over everything, but over Huck the thickest.

There is a night when Huck can't sleep, night terrors. She gets them sometimes, even in Andrea's house. She doesn't say anything, doesn't tell the story of the nightmares to him, doesn't ask for comfort, only twists her head underneath Toby's hand when they say goodnight like a submissive animal, a tired dog. They have one of their silent conversations: are you okay? no. do you want me to stay? please, daddy.

Toby removes his jacket, his shoes. Huck is a dark space at the far side of the small bed when Toby lifts the covers up. Toby smiles: all right, kid, you got me. Huck stares down at the pillow. Toby gets in the bed and lies on his side. He turns Huck around gently, so that the little girl is facing the window by the bed, and her shoulderblades are sharp points against his chest.

Fitful sleep binds them both in darkness. Toby wakes feeling as though Huck has melted into his body: transubstantiated. Her arms are warm underneath his, her short hair prickles the concavity of his neck where the back of Huck's head fits exactly. The boundary of their two bodies, the thin black line that winds one atom's width between them, pulses, and then dissolves. Toby falls asleep with one hand in the centre of Huck's belly; Huck's middle and third finger have looped around Toby's thumb.

In the morning, Molly wakes them both, and it's all okay.

 

ii.

Washington, D.C., 2002.

When they were first born it was one of the things Toby was relieved about, one of the very few. Later, in his heart, it was one of the (even fewer) things he regretted. Andrea had teased him, during the good days of the pregnancy, late nights and sunny weekends, in her bed, about his male ego-centricism -- wanting a boy so he can teach the masculine things that are jokes to her: pennies in the fist and the sexist cheers at Yankees games and the ritualisation of courting a girl; all the usual male mysteries. Toby had not argued then, just that once. She had been just right, and terribly wrong.

But later he could look at his daughters, understanding what his job is: serve and protect, wipe up the tears and kiss the bruises, hold them tight and tell them stories. No need to worry about any of that other stuff; that esoteric masculine stuff.

*

New York, 2022.

In a notebook, nestled around the pages of the notes he is taking for his Faulkner paper, his uninspired Latin translations, and his compositions for Creative Writing, Huck writes:

_Identity is something you have to believe in, or it all becomes too confusing. Drowned in choice. Everything swallows you up -- so many possibilities and contradictions. You have to know all the turnings, all the right streets to walk down. It's so easy to get turned around and forget where you were going, with all those back seat drivers; conflicting directions._

It is so hard, sometimes, to even remember who I am. But you'd never catch my mother, my father, my sister, wondering something like that. They just know.

My knowing is a different kind, and all the threads are tangled.

It is a notebook thick with annotation and Post-It notes by this point, the one that Huck writes in. Black-bound in leather and with good quality paper but Huck keeps it in his rucksack so the surface of the leather is battered and scarred. He bought it on the day they confirmed his first surgery date and it has been with him ever since. Huck thinks of it now as the book of himself. He's scared -- irrationally nervous -- of the day that he runs out of pages. He can't imagine every showing the book to anyone: it would be like a flaying, down through his ribs and into his chest; a page-by-page reveal of the smallest chambers of his heart, their shadows and blood, the sour ruptures and rough tramline scars.

His therapist -- the new one, the one his guy in Baltimore recommended but of whom Huck is so far reserving his own opinion -- calls him and chides him gently about not having made a new appointment. Huck stares at what he's just written in the notebook for a while, waiting for the man to stop speaking, then fobs him off; a line about his endocrinologist double-booking him. The doctor chuckles, softly. _I guess we're going to need to talk about avoidant tendencies at some point, Mister Ziegler_. Huck's belly seems to contract -- at the gentle reproof, at the tone, at the use of that name, _his_ name now. He stutters something out: _I ... n-need a referral. Soon. The other one, I mean_. There is a space of warm silence; Huck imagines the doctor nodding his head. _That's good, Huck. The last big step, hmm?_ Huck nods himself, stupidly, then agrees audibly, then, after they've settled a date, hangs up.

He stands in front of the mirror -- forces himself to do it. He's naked, cold, still flinching from his own reflection. His stubble is growing in a bit, weaker than the sideburns, but passable. He thinks the weight he put on last summer went to the right places -- his belly and shoulders, which seem rounded and solid, reassuringly present, and the thick strips of muscle in his arms -- but he still sees too many curves where he should see straight lines. He scratches his fingernails in his chest hair, like a guy trying to pull off nonchalance and failing, then runs the pad of his thumb underneath each of his pectorals in turn. He still flinches, though there is no pain there anymore. His hipbones are sharp, like polished soapstone. His thighs seem too fat, ill-defined. The hair here is black, thick, weaving. That at least contents him.

Between his legs there is, what? A void, he thinks sometimes, or something that is invisible to him. Other times a lie. Still others, when he is in the bed groping for sleep and his imagination is feeding him all his favourite fantasies, a spring of flesh, a shape to fit the curl of his fist, a focal point, a length of thrown, bright light.

Though he knows from experience that it will only worsen the depression he can feel creeping into his heart like a back-door thief, Huck goes and lies down in the bed and shuts his eyes tightly and grasps the air in his fist and lets his thumb do the real work and rubs out his thoughts for a few moments in a series of red, bitter grunts.

*

Tuesday comes. The lecture hall fills up with bodies. None of them possess a dark slick quiff and Stephen hates himself for the bitter stone of disappointment he feels sink to the bottom of his stomach, but not enough to really listen to what the professor is saying rather than brood on the absence of Huck Ziegler's slight shoulders in the seat directly opposite his own.

*

He remembers that someone asked him, one day, when he was fifteen years old and there was the intoxication of closeness and a summer day that seemed to have lasted at least twice the ordinary hours, what colour he thought best described his personality; what colour his soul is.

Huck remembers that he thought _blue_ immediately. The blue of the first ten metres of the ocean, of a kingfisher's breast in a book, of his dad's least-worn tie. And that he didn't know then if he thought blue because of all those things, or because blue is for boys and he wanted to leap into that body of blue water and become something of azure and cobalt and aquamarine and see his skin turn coarse and his muscles strong, swim away from the fat that has gathered in all the wrong places, become tall and lean and darker than ever, become something that is desirable and correct, become something he wanted, so desperately, to be.

And as he said _blue_ slowly and his friend -- Julia, who wore pink sometimes and yellow often and was wondering about going to nursing school -- raised her eyebrows and smiled and said, _that figures_, Huck had remembered something he read once: that no person can ever understand another's concept of a colour. What Julia saw as blue might not be Huck's blue; Julia's steady, unostentatious understanding of her sex was not Huck's dim red nightmare in which he was sure he would run in endless circles until he found some kind of exit. The running was getting so tiring. Huck remembers feeling so tired then.

That night, when dusk finally came at nine forty-five, Huck fell asleep with his head in Julia's lap. She was stroking his hair, like his mother still did sometimes -- as though there was something in his heavy head that she could never understand.

*

Stephen gets his silent wish on the next Tuesday: Huck is there, in the seat at the front, wearing a pink and white striped Oxford shirt tucked into black jeans, and a dark grey tie that Stephen mistakes for a thin scarf at first loosely around his neck. His shoulders seem more contained today to Stephen; holding more unnameable tensions even than usual. Secrets, Stephen thinks, staring at him, trying not to. _I wish I knew your secrets_.

Huck sits hunched over, with his arm curled around his papers like a little boy shielding his test answers. Stephen notices delicate-looking wrists, darkened with black hair; a watch with its small face -- small enough to look small on those thin wrists -- turned down into the desk; the way Huck's left foot keeps tapping a non-rhythm against the leg of his chair; the loose material of the pleat in the back of his shirt, that stretches and sags with the movement of Huck's body; the abbreviated line of Huck's back; how fucking much he wants to put his hands in that hair.

At the end of two hours, Stephen can't make the words _where were you last week?_ come out of his mouth. In his head they sound too accusatory for an acquaintance of a few week's standing. Too much like _you left me/I missed you/when can I see you again?_ So he doesn't say anything.

"Hey," Huck says. His voice, Stephen thinks, sounds like his father's. But not like the voice his father used to lecture; like the voice he used afterwards, when he was taking questions, after he accepted their applause like a jug of hot water thrown in the face. Huck sounds diffident, like he isn't sure whether Stephen will remember him. Stephen almost grins. _Oh man, if you only knew._

"My sister," he is saying, "My sister's visiting me. And she insisted that English Literature -- even the postgraduate level stuff -- was a waste of my time. So who cared if I missed one stupid lecture."

Stephen laughs. "That's a pretty hardcore sister you have there."

Huck smiles. "She's my twin. Apparently."

"Cool," Stephen says, then worries that that was just about the lamest response to such information ever. So he tries again: "She doesn't go here?"

"Nah. Berkeley."

"You didn't want to run away to California?"

"She's the flighty one," Huck says, smiling again. Stephen wishes he wouldn't quite so often. "I would have missed my folks too much."

"You're close with them?"

"Yeah," Huck says. "I told my dad about you the other day," he says, after a pause. "Or, what you said."

Stephen swallows. "Yeah?"

Huck grins. "He said he remembers a few students who didn't actually fall asleep."

 

iii.

The first time they kiss -- in a lost corridor of the English department with spiders the size of balled-up socks lurking in its corners -- Stephen can't resist putting both his hands into that coiffured hair. It is black, sleek, heavy with some kind of oil that smells like limes. The quiff curls back on itself like a tsunami and Stephen grins just watching it collapse onto Huck's pale forehead, helpless, shimmering, its blackness showing all the brighter the new flush on Huck's cheeks. Stephen takes it into his hands, holding the wave of hair tenderly in his hands like a sleeping animal. He is taller than Huck by better than half a foot and it is easy for him to fist his fingers in the quiff, use it to pull Huck's head back, to uncover his throat, the suggestion of collarbones underneath his thin tee, then release him, drag his own thumb through Huck's bristly sideburns, use it to part Huck's lips again --

"_Fuck_," Stephen says, under his breath.

Huck rests the back of his head against the wall as Stephen releases him. His eyes are closed and there is a high colour in his cheeks. Stephen floats a finger down and across Huck's cheek, bends the finger into a curl and rubs the first knuckle over Huck's lower lip.

"You aren't going to say 'wow' now, are you?" Huck asks, murmurs. His eyes flick open and up to Stephen's, glittering.

"No. Some other cliché. Whatever you'd like."

"Tell me a story," Huck says, kissing Stephen's neck.

"What kind of story?"

"What were you like when you were a little boy, Steve?"

"What was I like?"

"Yeah."

"Do I get quid pro quo?"

Huck takes in a breath and it quivers in his voice when he says, "Sure."

*

>   
> From: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu  
> To: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu
> 
> Hey bro --
> 
> So this guy you were telling dad about (yes he told me, deal with it) were you, in fact, ever going to mention him to me? Can I meet him? I promise not to scare him too much. Though, I have to say -- a graduate student in English Literature? That is so like you, Huck. You're so predictable. ;)
> 
> Anyway, I gotta go -- apparently I have papers to write or something. Whatever.
> 
> Love you.
> 
> \-- Mol xx
> 
>  
> 
> From: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu  
> To: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu
> 
> Hey sis --
> 
> I'm never telling dad anything ever again. And you can tell him I said that.
> 
> And, by the way, you're all jumping ahead a little bit here. He's just a guy I talk to in lectures sometimes.
> 
> Cute though. ;)
> 
> Come by soon, okay? I miss you.
> 
> \-- Huck
> 
>  
> 
> From: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu  
> To: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu
> 
> Huck --
> 
> Dad says he knows that tone you get in your voice when you like someone like that. So, you're busted. Tell me everything please.
> 
> \-- M.
> 
>  
> 
> From: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu  
> To: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu
> 
> M --
> 
> Seriously. No confiding in him ever again. He does understand this right? Jeez.
> 
> Stephen Ellman. He's twenty-six, I think. Grad school. Blond. Plays baseball like dad wishes he could have only, you know, better. Also apparently likes both Marvell *and* Whitman *and* Roethke, so there's a bit of puzzling out to do there. We meet in the middle -- Leonard Cohen.
> 
> He's cute. And evidently blind. He asked me out -- I think -- for Saturday. So please tell dad that if I see him peeking around a menu at that pizza place on Old Fulton St then I won't be responsible.
> 
> \-- H.
> 
>  
> 
> From: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu  
> To: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu
> 
> H. --
> 
> Oh, Brooklyn for a first date. Nice.
> 
> \-- M.
> 
>  
> 
> From: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu  
> To: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu
> 
> M. --
> 
> What part of the words 'graduate student' did you not understand?
> 
> \-- H.
> 
>  
> 
> From: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu  
> To: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu
> 
> H. --
> 
> Democrat?
> 
> \-- M.
> 
>  
> 
> From: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu  
> To: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu
> 
> M. --
> 
> What do you take me for?
> 
> \-- H.
> 
>  
> 
> From: mollywyattziegler@berkeley.edu  
> To: huck.ziegler@ccny.cuny.edu
> 
> H. --
> 
> Then mom, dad, and I say: have fun. ;)
> 
> Love you.
> 
> \-- M.

*

Stephen can't remember ever being this nervous about a date, though it is true that he hasn't had too many others to draw comparisons with. But between spending an hour trying on all the clothes in his wardrobe and brushing his hair every which way it will go and some it will not until his head resembles a old wooden-handled scrubbing brush, its varnish nothing but a fading memory and its bristles more like needles, twanging against the comb Stephen is pulling through them. Eventually he whispers _oh fuck this_ under his breath, shoves his head under the faucet in his bathroom, winces from the freezing cold water then towels himself off, runs his fingers through the darkened tangle that has resulted. He slides in front of the mirror, gives himself one wary glance then nods. He realises that his hands are shaking as he turns his key to lock his apartment door.

He wants to tell himself that it's stupid, this huge and billowing infatuation with a twenty year old kid he hardly knows; that it is girlish, silly, something that he is bound to trip over, break his nose, or his neck; that it would be simpler to just concentrate on getting Huck pliable and lustful and try to put to bed some of this esoteric fretting with a good, honest fuck. But he thinks perhaps that is something he can never do, either the simple screw or the pushing-aside of bigger, more terrible things. So he keeps on walking, gets down to the subway, sits on the train with his hands curled in his lap, rocking his knee up and down, trying to make himself feel hungry.

Stephen gets to the restaurant first and watches the door for Huck, taking sips from a drink he doesn't remember ordering but which definitely has alcohol in it. When Huck appears at the door -- black shirt, dark silver tie, dark blue jeans, and black worn boots -- Stephen just _smiles_. He makes some kind of sunshine and suddenly it is warm, comforting inside this artificial crucible of desire; the test doesn't seem so insurmountable. Stephen realises that his fingers no longer feel numb and cold. Huck makes it to the table.

"Hey," he says.

"Hello," Stephen says.

"Drinking?"

"I need to," Stephen says before he realises what he's saying.

"I'll decide to take that as a compliment," Huck says, sitting down. He's grinning, and the shape is a wild, strange thing in his face.

They eat pizza. They talk. Huck laughs, shattering the air around Stephen like tire irons through an endless series of plate-glass windows. Stephen breathes in the fragments of glass. There is the usual artifice -- Stephen tells the stories he keeps for best, studiously avoids the topic of his crazy father, glosses over how much he hated school the first time and concentrates instead on how much better the second time around seems to be going, never brings up any ex-boyfriends (particularly the sadistic, the vapid, the short-lived, the love-unrequited ones) at all. Huck listens because, Stephen thinks, that is what he does. Stephen asks him questions -- about his father, sister, mother (all of them now famous in their varied ways to Stephen), about D.C. and about New York, about whether he wants to get more serious about those poems he writes in the margins of his books, whether he really _really_ believes that Raymond Chandler is 'the' literary great; the Huck Ziegler mythos. It unfolds, as much as it can in three hours. It gets damp in the rain as they walk back to Stephen's place without really deciding to, damper still as they kiss in the street. It quietens as they reach the door. It sounds a little nervous as it accepts coffee (of the non-euphemistic kind). It sublimes from information to a loose collection of those airy esoteric things when they kiss again. Stephen fills in some gaps with the taste of Huck's neck, the first unbuttonings of his shirt, more time with his fingers in that amazing hair --

"Steve, stop."

He whispers it, and the words fall on Stephen like bombs. He looks frightened and where their hands have joined up -- a scramble of fingers and smooth pale skin and the chaste press of their wrists -- Stephen can feel Huck's heartbeat, an erratic phrase, repeating over and over, very very fast.

"Sorry," Stephen says. The word blurs on his lips. His lips hurt because they are so full of blood; his heart, his fear, his whole chest opened up. He runs the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip, stalling, hoping that he can stop Huck saying what he is about to stay: _i don't want to do this i don't want you this won't work this_ \--

"I have to tell you something."

"Yeah?"

"That sounds so stupid," Huck says distantly. "But I can't think of any other way to say it."

"Say what?"

"It's like coming out all over again," Huck says. He sighs, takes his hand away, run it through his hair and works his thumb knuckle over his forehead. "Jesus."

"Huck. What is it?"

"Just, before you ... before _we_ went any further. You should know something. I mean, it'd get pretty obvious. Will do, if you carry on."

"_What_?"

"I should have a speech prepared," Huck says. He looks up at Stephen with his face all in shadows. His stubble is growing in, making angles in his face, drawing him out to a point. "But this is the first time I've told anyone ... or anyone like you."

"Like me?"

"Like a boyfriend."

"Oh," Stephen says. "Okay."

"Uh, I'm ... maybe leaping ahead on that a little," Huck says. "Sorry."

"Actually, I don't think you are."

Huck smiles. "I hope not."

"Good."

"But I'm no good at this part."

"So just tell me."

"I'm scared."

"Don't be."

"That's kinda easy for you to say. Now."

"Just tell me."

He pours it out, all on a single breath of air: "I'm the T part of LGBT. I'm transsexual. Female to male. I'm almost finished with all the surgery that I won't elaborate on unless you want me to. I take hormones every two weeks. And I'm stealth, obviously. And I like you, a lot, Steve. And I didn't want you t- to not know. You'd find out anyway. But any more felt like leading you on. I didn't feel right about that."

There is a silence, for a while. Stephen finds himself tilting his head to look at Huck, who is staring down at his hands.

Eventually Stephen says, "I thought you were going to cut me loose."

Huck smiles. "Glad I didn't?"

Stephen meets his eyes. Then he leans across and kisses Huck's cheek. His skin is hot. There are traces of vanishing acne close to his hairline. Stephen strokes the back of his right index finger over the line of Huck's sideburn, on the right side.

"Yeah. Pretty glad."

"Freaked?" Huck is still smiling, but in a way that reminds Stephen of sparks flying off a wheel; a metal tool on stone; life being sharpened past the point of bearing. "It's okay to say yes," Huck says, quietly.

"Not freaked. Surprised, maybe."

"Thought I was a real boy, huh?" Huck says. He sounds sad, defeated. Confessions won't make him happy, and Stephen knows that much about him.

"I think you are."

"You know a lot about it?"

"I know you. I think."

"Maybe."

"You could tell me a bit more. Make it a bit easier for me over here." He means it as a joke, but it seems to hit Huck like a blow; the exhale of his breath is sharp, like a sudden depredation.

"I'll take you to the library. You can read up."

"Huck -- "

"I can't make it any easier," Huck says. "I don't particularly _want_ to."

"I just meant -- "

"Yeah. I got it."

"Huck."

"I'm not your transsexuality 101 guy, Steve. Okay?" He says. His eyes _hurt_, hurt both of them. Stephen imagines them burning in Huck's head, and the scorch marks on his own skin. "I've been through all this with my sister, my parents, my friends, the shrinks, here at school. I'm sick of all that. _Explaining_."

Stephen stretches out a hand, just to lay it on Huck's shoulder, but he shrugs away from it.

"So just tell me about you," Stephen says.

"You still give half a damn?"

"A whole damn. Kinda a big one. You know?"

Huck blows out a long breath. "Yeah. Me too. Look, I'm sorry -- "

"_I'm_ sorry. It was a thoughtless thing to say." Stephen tries once more to touch him, just still the milling crowd of charged particles fizzing around his head, around the dull, hurt words still in his mouth. This time he accepts a hand on his shoulder and Stephen strokes it down his arm, twice. Huck keeps on staring at his hands. "Look, I just fucked up that bit, that little bit. I won't fuck up anymore."

"Because you're so perfect?" Huck says, looking up, smirking. Stephen thinks: you are so totally beautiful, and I'm falling in love with you, and I don't care.

"Yeah. I am just that perfect."

Huck smiles, doesn't laugh. "Okay."

"I just ... I - I don't _know_ a lot about ... about these issues. I know I should, but. But I just don't."

Huck smiles again: his eyes, for Stephen, are like coals, glowing, and hot enough to burn himself on. The smile is tired, but genuine.

"I didn't really expect you to, Steve."

"I'm not ... I mean. I'm -- "

"And you're not freaked out? You know, besides the stuttering?"

"Huck -- "

"I can tell you about it. If you'd like."

"I would like."

"I promised you quid pro quo, after all."

Stephen smiles. "Yes, you did."

Huck smiles down at his hands, in an absent way, as though for a moment he isn't really there anymore. Stephen wants to touch him: stroke his hair again, kiss him. Huck's shoulder and right arm are pressing into Stephen's left side. Everything on the small couch, that is full of dust and what Stephen imagines as the remnants of the hideously bleak sexual encounters of all the guys who have rented this apartment before him, is warm. The air is heavy; the smell of Huck's cologne is like a small, unripe fruit lodged in the back of Stephen's throat. Stephen remembers the kiss at the department, and the one tonight, in the cold night, just starting - just like a movie that never stars guys like them -- to rain softly. Huck's hair was thick, coarse even. The burn of his stubble was something Stephen's lips were still complaining about for hours after the first time. And now, here -- tiny couch, dark room, the sound of rain outside and the closeness of the atmosphere inside -- he seems so boyish, and the scent underneath the sweetness of the cologne is dark, musk like a fist closing around Stephen's throat. Stephen has been staring at Huck's brittle-looking wrists where they lie on his thighs. He has been staring at Huck's thighs. He has been trying not to let his gaze stray.

All the cues are correct; only the history, and the history of definitions, are wrong.

Huck could run away with this situation if he wanted to: he could ask Stephen to do just about anything at this point, and it would get done. Stephen wants to tell him so, but has no idea how. Huck would shrug it away. He would think the words were an emollient; poured on the crackling space that separates Huck's experience and Stephen's understanding; something to get them into the bed, somehow. Stephen has no idea how to explain that he isn't that guy; he doesn't even know if that is true.

"Huck?"

"Huh?"

"You ... you stopped talking there."

"Sorry. Was thinking about where to start."

"Start at the beginning."

Huck looks up from the blank contemplation of his own hands. "Molly's right."

"About what?"

"You're a ... a very _typical_ choice. For me, I mean."

Stephen feels himself blushing. "Well, I'm going to probably need you to deconstruct that statement later on. But, right now?"

"Start at the start. Begin the beguine."

"Yes."

"All right."

 

iv.

New York, 2010.

Molly hears the fall as a whisper of air, and the crash like a slammed door by her ear. She is looking up into the canopy of the tree, trying to track the squirrel or whatever it was they saw up here, and the sun is in her eyes and when she looks back at the ground, everything she sees is speckled blue and yellow, points of colour that are not cohering into a picture. So she takes a minute to understand that it is Huck lying down there, twisted leg and open, screaming mouth, like a scribble in the dirt.

"_Dad!_"

At the Emergency Room the doctor calls Huck _your brother_. Molly doesn't bother to correct him, neither does dad, not at first anyway, though she does wonder -- not for the first time -- why, with her short hair and dungarees, she never gets mistaken for a boy anymore. Huck is sullen, staring down at her hands and letting everyone else answer the doctor's questions. Dad is stroking her hair, or trying to -- Huck twists out of his reach. Molly frowns at that, because it's not like Huck to do that, to pull away from dad. Molly looks up at her father, follows the angle of his gaze down past Huck's shoulder to where his hand is clenching and unclenching on top of the white sheet covering the gurney. Huck sits still and silent and her face is white and Molly can't see the tear tracks anymore.

"First broken bone," the doctor says, holding out his hands to take Huck's arm so he can examine the break. "You're officially a man now, son."

Huck looks up into the guy's face and something Molly doesn't understand happens in Huck's eyes -- some kind of blossoming of hope and confusion, and embarrassment, some kind of ache that hurts her because they're sisters and everything that hurts Huck hurts her too. While Molly watches the something twists away, like a fish in water; it glistens, and when their dad says, in a quiet voice, "Actually, this is my daughter", it is gone.

*

"It was my idea to climb the tree, dad. I'm sorry."

Her father doesn't look up from the road, away from the wheel. "No need to be sorry, honey. I was there. Huck's okay. It was an accident."

"I just ... I didn't know Huck'd fallen. If I had, I'd -- "

"_Molly_."

It's the voice he uses when he doesn't want to talk; the quiet one that wraps around her heart like a pair of hands, pressing gently, like she did once with their pet hamster when they were six years old and Molly held it in her palms frantically trying not to squeeze too tightly, afraid, feeling the animal's heart thumping into her skin. She looks at the back of her dad's head, tries to fathom him out and can't work out if he's angry, or worried, or just thinking about Huck and her broken leg, back at the hospital.

"Daddy -- "

"Mol, it's okay. Don't worry."

But Molly finds that not worrying is pretty hard.

When they get back, her dad calls home: calls her mom in D.C.. Molly sits by herself on her dad's couch with her face pressed against its arm, inhaling the smell of the cigars her dad isn't meant to smoke inside the apartment and that smell she misses when he's gone, when they are back at home and daddy seems like a memory -- a dream she had one night and never really woke up from. The smell is dusty, like old books a little, and it makes Molly sleepy because it is bedtime stories and the crackle of his beard against her cheek, and it is dark and sweet and like chocolate and like the smell in the movie theatre after the lights go out. Molly sits with her chin on her crossed arms and watches her dad talking to her mom. Eventually he comes over, and hands her the phone silently.

"Huck keeps following you up those trees, huh?" her mom says.

"I didn't say anything, I didn't, you know, I didn't make her!"

"I know, sweetie. It's okay. Sometimes a person needs to climb a tree," her mom says, and Molly can tell that she's smiling at the other end of the line and somehow that helps, the knowledge of that smile. "I know how that can be."

"Okay, mom."

"Okay, Mol. You sleep well, okay?"

"Okay."

"Put your dad back on?"

"Sure."

*

Huck is skinny, pale. Shadows tend to gather under his eyes and roost by his cheekbones like ravens. The inside of him, the places that are only real at night once Molly is asleep and his daylight self -- the proud mirror of his sister -- has gone dark, is a labyrinthine palace. And so long as he remembers the bright red thread, the ball of cotton; the sound of Molly's voice, he never gets lost.

He never has until now.

In the hospital bed he doesn't want to sleep. He is afraid, sick to his stomach. Something they gave him isn't sitting right, something is messing up inside him. He wants to call out but he's afraid to do that too; afraid of the night-shift nurse and her pinched-in face. So he lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling and rations out the time his eyes can spend closed: ten seconds, fifteen, count them in and count them out, thirty, wake up! that was too long, that was almost a minute ...

When he falls asleep it is like heavy hands closing his eyelids, like they think he's dead and they have to close his eyes.

Huck dreams. All the dreams are about broken bodies.

It isn't like waking up, not like a revelation that way. It's more like falling asleep; like a falling away, like taking off all your clothes and living with your nakedness inside your own head, nowhere to hide from it, no filters or comforters. He runs the finger -- the one his imagination has provided that isn't attached to anything except his brain -- along the body. It's okay, not too bad. Except that he doesn't recognise it, except that it doesn't spark any recognition inside the labyrinth; he doesn't remember having walked in it, or slept in it, or used it to cuddle up to another body.

Around the nipples there is a little puff of attention that is not wanted. There are new definitions moving in there, behind the skin, little unwanted guests -- femininity, the impossibility of twisting away from the word 'girl' however hard he runs, that the (other?) boys at school will begin to change and turn away.

And Jamie will never look again at a freak like this.

Huck's best friend is Jamie Whitman, whose middle name is Walt because his parents read too much poetry before he was born and thought that inflicting obvious nomenclature on their only son would be improving. It might have been the main reason Huck (Huckleberry Wyatt-Ziegler, the girl with the boy's name that sounds like it could long ago have belonged to a girl, the double-barrels, the famous parents, the invisible twin, the child who does not resemble in any way his literary ancestor) liked him, to begin with.

Now the reason is that Huck is hopelessly in love with him.

Molly and Huck and Jamie. They are a team, a three, a triangle. But not all the sides of the triangle are the same size, or so it seems to Huck.

Molly has a crush on Jamie too. Huck knows because Jamie is the one that Molly challenges to races across the park, thumb-wrestling matches and their customary game of fastest to the top of the tree. he knows because Molly is especially sarcastic to Jamie, even more than she is to Huck. he knows because he's seen Molly looking at Jamie, with a strange propriety in her eyes and because, sometimes, though not very often, Molly is still talking about something Jamie did until well after Huck wants, desperately, to go to sleep at night.

And Huck has sat and thought about this. he has thought about this a lot.

About why it seems more correct that Molly and Jamie should form part of a duo; that his sister has some kind of realness about her that Huck does not possess. That Molly would never -- Huck knows she would not -- look into a mirror and see anything except herself: clear and bright, a collection of lights all shining, all correct. Molly teases him about his fear of mirrors sometimes; to her such a phobia doesn't make any sense. But when Huck looks in the mirror there is nothing but a blur, something unreal and incoherent; a form as yet undecided and that knows, somehow, that it is not wanted and so does its best to disturb. Molly sees her friend, herself, in the mirror; Huck has never seen anything friendly there.

Jamie -- blond, already pretty tall for a seventh grader, quiet but not in a way that turns away from other people, kind but not in a way that makes him vulnerable -- is the kind of person who sees friendly things in the mirror too. Huck knows that, and he accepts it. But it doesn't stop his heart aching, more than a little.

For all that Molly is just as much of a tomboy as Huck is, for all that she usually scowls when mom asks her to wear a dress to go see grandma, there is no dissonance clanging around Molly's body like Huck feels around his own. And Huck can't imagine Jamie loving someone who clangs against the safe, normal music that Jamie himself makes, that Huck finds so beautiful.

When the dream turns and Huck realises that he is suddenly in New York, with his father, and that he is older, taller, and that there is something different about the way he walks -- something that rolls and pitches, a lower centre of gravity, a new and unsecret fulcrum that feels oiled and smooth as a new engine -- it is the first time that he considers what might be causing this strangeness, this dissonance.

In the dream, walking jacket cuff-to-jacket cuff with his father, he is a man.

*

In a new notebook, bought for school compositions, Huck Ziegler, aged twelve, writes:

_Gender on a curve -- thirty degrees toward masculine; turning 180 on femininity; grades as follows: an A for sullenness, a B for tomboyish pursuits, a C for posture, a D for dress and demeanour and an F for being 'normal'._

He tears the page out of his notebook, balls it up and throws it in the trashcan. Later, once his mom has been in to remind him to clean out his half of the room, Huck retrieves the paper, sneaks down to the kitchen and steals out one match from the pack by the stove, lights it and then the notebook page, waits for it to burn down to his fingertips and then throws the ashes into the sink and washes them away.

*

When Huck and Molly are thirteen or fourteen, or somewhere in between, after a period of courtship that seems to the twins to have lasted all of their lives and probably -- as Molly says -- most of their parents' lives too, their father comes to live with them in the house on D street. His professorship at Columbia, so he says, is the kind of thing that can be kept going by twice-weekly trips to New York and therefore does not require his constant residence in the city.

The year leading up to the move saw more and more mornings where Huck and Molly would get up and come down to the kitchen table to find their dad there, making eggs, swigging coffee, filling the house up with the silences he made. And a lot of the time their mom would come down too, from her room that is across the hall from the small bedroom where Toby would sleep if ever he stayed over, and kiss their father, like they'd been apart for a long time and hadn't wanted to be, and sometimes she would kiss him like she'd forgotten the twins were even there. And Molly would grin and look away, and Huck would look away and not understand why there was an anxious, stabbing pain in his belly and a roar of confusion in his head.

They get married for the second time simply, without much ceremony. On the day, to Huck, Toby seems too quiet, tender to a fault; like he isn't done apologising for something he did a long time ago; a little like he is expecting to wake up any second, like this is all some dream that is screwing around with him. He kisses Huck's mom like she might break, or like he might leave a mark on her in smudges of ink. But his mom just grins and laughs and teases him, and hugs him so tight after the vows are done: Huck can see her knuckles go white around Toby's waist.

Life doesn't actually change that much, on the surface anyway. They still go to school. Mom goes to work every day. Dad goes every couple of days, and works most nights on his papers, and other people's papers, and the book he has been writing. But Toby is there more than he is absent suddenly and Huck finds that his understanding of his own world has changed because of this: that his body seems to thrum and vibrate with energy and excitement, and an odd kind of fear, when he shares space with his father. Suddenly he understands that although they have always been close something is different now, something has thrown them out of balance -- it makes Huck aware of the shapes of Toby's body, how the air changes around him, how he smells different and how the house itself smells different now he lives inside it as well; how suddenly there is a man leaving an imprint on the space which Huck has always understood as something belonging to women; how that realisation makes something inside him that he has tried so hard to stifle and suppress start to ache.

*

Huck remembers the first time his sister wore a dress willingly. For him it is a tiny landmark; a red circle on a calendar inside his head. A date he remembers Molly promising him would never arrive. Homecoming. Molly and their mom go out to the mall and spend three hours picking out dresses, come back with four alternatives, two of which go back to the store, leaving one to hang on Molly's closet, resplendent in its plastic covering; Molly smoothes it flat every night before bed. The last dress, the one they picked out for Huck, stays in its bag. Creased, taffeta the colour of embarrassment and yellow buttons like the tiny heavy stones Huck can feel in his belly these days, little lies leaking acid. One night on the wrong side of the midpoint between the time when he could deny the prospect of this stupid dance and the dance itself, Huck gets out of bed and shoves the bag in the closet. He cannot look at it anymore.

"You don't want to go?" his dad says, softly.

There are two nights left to go before the dance; Huck's belly is tender and uncomfortable. Nervousness and low-grade terror percolate there like bitter coffee.

"No. I ... I'd rather just stay home. Mol's all excited. It's driving me crazy, actually," Huck says, trying to laugh. His father's grey impassivity kills the chuckle. "I'd rather stay home."

Toby nods, slowly. Huck watches his eyebrows shift upwards an eighth of an inch, then come back down again having made no noticeable change in his expression. _We don't have to talk about this now._

"Sure, kid. Okay."

"I'm not ... I mean, it's not like I'm missing anything. Not really."

"Just other people," Toby says, glimmering around his edges; his smile that comes out of nowhere, like an apology Huck doesn't want.

"Exactly."

"And your sister's boyfriend."

"Oh, shut up, dad."

"Look, Huck, I know you don't -- "

"It's not _about_ that, dad!"

His father, whose quietude can fill a room as quick as poison gas -- squeezing out all the oxygen and forcing you to speak just to take your mind off the prospect of choking to death, seems to wince away from him. Then he nods, then he crosses the room -- from the kitchen to where Huck is sitting hunched over with his arms wrapped around his chest, on the couch -- and lays his heavy hand on Huck's head. The strands of Huck's too-clean hair wilt under its warmth. His thumb strokes Huck's hairline, brushing twice over plain skin. Then he leans over and kisses Huck's forehead, softly, like he's embarrassed by his own tenderness, like it reduces his ability to move smoothly, calmly; Huck can feel the nervous static prickling on his skin.

"You don't want to go, you don't have to."

Toby's eyes, looking directly into Huck's darkly, hold secrets; Huck doesn't know anymore whose they are.

"Thanks, dad."

"I think you probably get the genes for social aversion from my side of the family, so. Anything I can do."

Huck smiles, mostly because he can't help it.

"Just ... be around for your sister, okay?"

"Okay, dad."

"Bed now."

Huck nods. "Bed now."

The next day, with the weight lifted from his chest -- but less than he had thought -- Huck sits in their bedroom, and watches Molly dress.

At fifteen Molly is still a slight, straight girl. Where Huck seems to take after Toby in a little more than temperament (has their father's blunt labourer's fingers and his dark face), his sister is, as the years pile up, looking more like their mother. There is a sharpness to Molly; she cuts through the air when she moves. Huck envies her that; has always supposed it is down to the fact that Molly took up the ballet and tap lessons their mother offered both of them, and he didn't. So Molly has grace where Huck has grown uneasiness, and Huck has no idea where to step or how to walk; isn't sure he would even want to know.

Molly's hair is long and black and straight and falls down her back onto pale skin, left uncovered by the new dress. Huck sits on Molly's bed and watches the process: his sister out of her bluejeans and unremarkable tee shirt into this concoction of satin and lace; how it makes curves that were not there before; how it makes waves on her body that rise and never crash, and shadows, and pale pale skin the colour of the moon outside the window, like she's never been outside in the sun in her life.

Huck sits on the bed, frowning. Cropped hair and a check shirt with short sleeves that he has rolled up even further, the same bluejeans Molly has thrown on the floor, and his black-rimmed glasses. He looks over the rims of these rather than through them, more as the metamorphosis wears on: what he sees makes a little ache in a corner of his heart that has never hurt this way before. Molly is grinning, laughing. She checks herself out in the mirror, once and twice; enough times for Huck to lose count. And when their mom comes in, and makes Molly turn around three times so she can have a real look and _god, honey, when did you get so beautiful?_ Huck feels that little ache turn dark and septic, cracking something open, something that won't go back to sleep.

Molly hugs him quickly as she goes out the door, and his mom kisses him and tells him she'll be back soon, and Huck thinks they both look at him a little funny, like there's something in his face now that they don't understand, and Huck wonders if it's that obvious -- this little piece of brokenness in him, that he can feel now, writhing, twisting and echoing, like the toll of some cracked bell. But the door of the car slams and the engine drowns out whatever it was Huck was about to think, and he turns and goes back to the door. His father is standing there, big and dark like a bear, and Huck, though he is fifteen and in the open air where anyone might see him, puts his arms around his father's waist and clings on tight. Toby kisses his head, right at the crown where Huck's hair curls thickest. He turns them both away from the threshold and closes the door with a twist of his foot and holds his arm around Huck's shoulders as he walks them through to the kitchen where he sits Huck down at the table and turns away and makes cocoa for both of them, with extra cream and marshmallows. Toby puts Huck's mug down first, then his own and sits behind it. Huck watches his father smile: a slow thing, like a flower unfurling. As usual, Huck can't help smiling back.

"Hey, kid."

"Hey, dad."

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"Huck."

" ... No."

"You want to tell me about it?"

Huck looks at his father. He tries to prise out those secrets that might be his own and might be Toby's. He gets lost: labyrinthine eyes, his father has, but he can't find anything in them like the the strangeness he found in those of his mother and his sister. Toby's face is calm and his eyes are only as sad as they always are, and Huck has always found that strangely comforting. But he doesn't want to say anything. Not yet.

Huck shakes his head. "No-o."

Toby's mouth shrugs, just a little. Then he nods slightly. "Okay." He takes a sip of his cocoa, and Huck watches the droplets hang heavily on his moustache, then shucked away by his tongue. "If you ever want to. I know, probably, you have better things to do than talk to me." A little raise of Toby's eyebrows here and in Huck a blossoming gratefulness for the delicate closeness they have, and the secrecy -- or at least the silence -- that attends it. "But if you ever want to talk about it. I'll listen."

Huck is in bed before Andy gets home, and asleep before Molly is, but he thinks he hears -- perhaps only in his dreams -- his parents talking: that Toby is trying to soften Andy's anxieties, that neither of them understand but his father has faith for his mother's worries and if Andy's low words prickle at Huck's heart there is something in Toby's softer tone, that ripples in the after-midnight air, that, if it does not soothe him exactly, at least takes something away from him, that lets him sleep.

v.

More dates occur. More dreams where Huck is the thing in the centre of the maze -- prize and danger, making Stephen quake at the opening of every night they spend together as much as he quivers with impatience waiting for those nights to arrive. A month or so passes. They walk back together from class, sometimes they hold hands. Stephen learns some of the intricacies of Huck's life -- is allowed to watch him inject testosterone into his thigh and, the second time, gets hard watching Huck rub the leftover fluid directly onto his cock. _It doesn't make any difference_ he says, smiling, _the oil suspension means it won't absorb into the skin but --_ he comes over and straddles Stephen's thighs, jeans unbuttoned, face flushed from the small jab of pain, _psychologically, it works_. Huck closes his eyes, leans in close and grinds himself down, his tee riding up between them, Stephen's hands scrabbling for Huck's nipples. Stephen comes in his pants.

They fuck often and well. Stephen learns to his advantage that Huck's favourite sex act is the blowjob. He watches Huck dress for an appointment to have his quiff brought back into line at the barber's, takes everything in from the comfort of his own bed: Huck letting the hair fall over his forehead, buttoning the check shirt, zipping up tight blue jeans over his Calvin Klein's and new packer -- because he says he needs to feel like he is made up of images to go to a place where there are so many mirrors; like everything in him is iron and steel, sharp hips and broad shoulders and a fat cock -- and Stephen almost makes him late and in need of a new outfit. His body is not something compromised to Stephen, but only unique and beautiful and itself. He is a little surprised by his own capacity for open-mindedness. He is aware of Huck's discontent, but only distantly -- as something that rises between them in the bed sometimes, as it will between two quiet, reticent men. He doesn't worry about it too much.

One night, lying in bed afterwards, Stephen says:

"You know I had an old career?"

"What, from age eleven to age twelve?"

"Age eight through sixteen, I was a painter. I mean, I wanted to be. I painted nude guys in my bedroom. From pictures, not from actual nude guys."

"Please don't say what you're about to say, Steve."

"I was scared my dad would find them, you know? See all those naked bits."

"I can't ... I can't do that."

"Let me paint you."

"No," Huck says. "No, no."

"I love the way you look," he says, softly. Little pleas in the dark. "You know the vulnerable places on guys -- the ankles, wrists, the insides of elbows, how soft a belly can be?"

"Please, don't, Steve -- "

"Let me finish. It's those places, and the juxtapositions. The strong places -- jaws and the muscles in a guy's neck. His shoulders. I've had dreams about your shoulders, about the line of your back. How square your hands are, all those little angles. I can't describe them in words, Huck. I can't write like you can. But I _need_ to describe them somehow."

"You don't need to that badly."

"Huck."

"No."

"I could take ... pictures, you know. Photos."

"Steve."

He chances a kiss. It lands, hope side up, on Huck's collarbone -- soft and hard at once, like the best kisses.

"I won't ... I mean, I won't show you. Afterwards. If you don't want me to."

"I ... can't."

His voice catches on: all the wrong places; the presences and absences; the places he has covered with black censor lines and blank denial; all the places that still hurt. He's trying not to cry, but he isn't succeeding. Stephen comforts without touching -- one palm curved around his skull and another on the shoulder: approved zones; skin that doesn't ache for the loss of things that were never given. Stephen kisses the space above Huck's eyebrow. Whispers: "Okay. I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And they sleep without speaking again, and Huck's body is all angles, and Stephen feels like a traitor for wanting to seek with his fingers for what soft places there still are there, where sparks and curves exacerbate love and make love aspire to art. In his sleep Huck sighs and shifts and Stephen wonders if he is forgiven, if only in dreams.

In the morning, Stephen wakes with Huck's head on his shoulder, the body curled around so close that it feels like there isn't an inch of boundary between them; no place where they aren't becoming fused. He waits for Huck to wake, and he is nervous, anticipatory. He listens to the sound of his own breathing. He thinks of ways to explain what he was trying to say, and ways to excuse what he actually said. They all seem to come down to the same three word sentence.

Eventually Huck wakes up and he is sweet, for about a second, then the same serious, troubled monster he is every morning. He lifts his head off Stephen's body and Stephen feels the weight leaving like someone has removed something important from inside his chest, something that makes him too light to walk around without running the risk of floating away altogether.

"Hey."

"Hey."

Huck runs his hand back through his hair. Stephen watches this, watches the flex of the muscles in Huck's chest, looks like he always does for the pink scars hiding under the hair, wants to put his hand flat up against the span of Huck's stomach, feeling for something he cannot find.

Huck says, "You know, the ancient Greeks thought that the seat of the soul was in the belly, not the heart."

"Huck, listen -- "

"You do that. You watch me. I ... I don't know ... what you find to look at."

"_You_."

"What you said made me really uncomfortable last night."

"I know. I realise that. I'm sorry, Huck."

"I'm not ready to ... I don't want to perform for you."

"Huck -- "

"I know. But that's what it felt like."

"Okay."

"Just because ... because I have a _name_ for what I feel about my body, and I'm going through a transition ... That doesn't mean it's all okay."

"I know."

"It doesn't mean I don't sometimes ... That I don't ever get confused or depressed or -- "

"I _know_, Huck."

Huck smiles. There is no warmth in the smile. "And having a _guy_ ... Having a man, who's always been ... " He takes a big breath and starts again. "Having a guy look at me like that, felt like ... fetishism. And I'm incredibly not okay with that, Steve."

Stephen reaches out and takes Huck's hand in both of his own. "I won't ask you again. I'm really sorry."

Huck looks up at him again. Now his face only looks sad, bleak. Then he smiles again, warmer this time, as though he's giving in now, because this unhappiness is so heavy that if he does not slip out from under it the weight will break his back. Stephen strokes his thumb over the Huck's hand, then raises his own hand to stroke his hair. He leans in to kiss Huck's cheek.

"You understand," Stephen says, into Huck's ear, "That I love you, right?"

As Stephen moves away Huck smiles, still sad. "Not really."

"Well, I do."

"Yeah," Huck says. "Me too."

They fuck that morning. And Stephen notices -- around his own small losses of consciousness -- abandon in Huck, which is a new flavour; a new thing. Stephen's cock jerks involuntarily when Huck takes hold of his head in both hands and pulls Stephen down between his thighs, opens them up and raises his hips. His small, covered cock fills Stephen's mouth like a thrown punch, like a mouthful of under-ripe plum. Huck is steel-strong and almost motionless, but for the constant buzz of suppressed pleasure: a bomb with a timer; Stephen listens to it ticking. He hooks his arms around Huck's thighs and pulls him in close and buries his face between Huck's legs and lets his whole mouth fill up with the taste of this man that he loves. When Huck comes his hips press up into Stephen's face; the meeting of hip and cheek bones making an ache, and then a kind of thunder. Huck moans; not words, but his voice sounds indescribably sweet to Stephen, like the sound he would use to draw those portraits he can never make; the sound of his vulnerable places.

*

"I think you're pretty," Jamie says.

Huck feels as though he's been punched in the face. On his lips are a crowd of sentences about how he thought Jamie liked Molly, or Julia, or A.J., or Sara, or any of those real girls, better than he could ever like Huck; how Huck is the kid he climbs the trees with, who kicks his ass at Unreal Tournament: Horizon and Sims 2020, who hides behind his camera and his notebooks; how Jamie doesn't understand what he's just said; how Huck feels like he's just been terribly insulted.

"What, that's such a terrible thing to say?" Jamie says, laughing a bit.

Huck frowns at him, trying to work out whether he's serious or whether this is some horrifically elaborate joke conjured up by him and Molly, some way to get him to stop feeling the way he does and face up to the reality of the situation, and his place inside it.

"I know you, you know," Jamie carries on. "I know you _like_ me. Derry Mitchell told me."

Huck makes a mental note to give Derry the cold shoulder (or the hot fist) next time he sees him.

"I thought ... I thought you'd want me to say that."

"So you can, what? Ask me out?"

"So what if I wanted to?"

"Fuck you, Jamie," Huck says, getting up from the ground, leaving his best friend there, in the dirt, the sun shining off the hair on his legs that seems to have grown all at once this summer, the shape of his thighs in the dark blue shorts. But Jamie sticks a hand out and grabs hold of Huck's arm.

"Hey, what the hell?"

Huck feels like screaming. His head is filling up with gas, with the hundred things he could say right now, with the knowledge that any one of those things would be wrong or at least so far off the mark it would hardly be worth using up the oxygen he'd need to say it. He feels crushed, as though in a vice or under a boulder; like everything inside him has contracted to this one single, red-hazed point of frustration and anger. He feels like his head is contorting with the pressure contained inside it, his skull expanding and contracting like a piece of metal being shaped. He feels like someone just cut his tongue off. He has no idea what to say.

Huck takes off, running, in a randomly chosen direction, just the shortest point on the straight line that leads away from Jamie Whitman.

Jamie, who runs track and plays baseball seriously and football casually, follows him. Huck can hear the pound of Jamie's sneakers in the grass, above the sound of his own heartbeat, which seems to be pulsing behind his temples not in his chest. He can hear the footsteps gaining.

It's a big park and it's late in the day, hardly anyone around. Huck dodges around a few dog walkers, a few seniors, one politico-looking guy in sweats who curses as Huck's shoulder glances off his arm and knocks him off the path. Huck doesn't stop. With his feet on the hard surface of the walkway he can go a bit faster, maybe adrenaline will help him out, maybe Jamie will give up.

But he isn't that surprised when a set of fingernails grazes the back of his shirt, then the back of his neck as the fingers they belong to grasp the collar of his shirt, choking him as he is pulled backwards and down, grazing his shin and knees on the path, then the back of Jamie's hand slapping him underneath the jaw.

"What d'you run away from me for?"

His voice is hard and horrible; betrayed and sour. It makes Huck's stomach fizz and ache just to hear it. There is a little blood dripping from Huck's nose. His tongue hurts where he bit it. His feet feel like the soles have just been burnt off.

"You gonna give me some answers?"

"You gonna hit me until I do?"

"I just wanted to say a nice thing, for chrissakes!"

"A nice thing you don't _mean_, Jamie!"

"I'm not allowed to think you're cute? Thanks so fucking much for letting me know what opinions I'm allowed to have."

"You don't get it. You never will get it!"

"Get what, for fuck's sake?"

"Guys like you don't think girls like me are cute, Jamie. It's like geeks and jocks. Fucking day and night. We don't meet in the middle!"

"I'm a jock now?"

Huck counts on his fingers: "Baseball, football, track, yeah I think you probably qualify!"

"I should make my pick from the cheerleaders, that's what you're saying?"

"I'm saying you don't _get_ it."

"Sounds to me like _you_ don't get it. I don't even know what the 'it' is!"

"Fuck you, Jamie, just _fuck you_."

Huck screams it, let the words rasp through his throat. And even as the sound leaves him he is still thinking how wrong his voice sounds, how thin and high and stupid, how like a _girl_ throws insults.

"Look, you want to be a freak, go ahead. I'm not gonna stop you."

"Thanks a bunch."

"I fucking like you, Huck. Okay? I like you a lot."

"I appreciate the charity, Jamie. I'll be sure to vote for you when it's Prom King time."

"Why can't you ever just take a damn compliment?"

Huck wants to say that these kinds of compliments are dissonant, strange, that they make him with embarrassment and rage and sadness, that whatever label Jamie wants to stick on him -- however complimentary Jamie thinks it should be, and however much it might lead to exactly what Huck wants: a resolve of the ache in his heart -- Huck will never accept it.

"I just ... can't, okay?"

"What's so wrong about it?"

Jamie's fists have splayed back into hands now. There's a bruise forming over his left eye where Huck must have thrown an elbow at him. Scuffing on his sneakers, on his knees. The traces of dust on the blue shorts. A little sweat staining under the arms of his tee.

"Look," he says, "I know you don't believe me, but I meant it. You're pretty. Like Molly. I mean, you are twins for chrissakes."

"Funny how everyone thinks that makes us the same person."

"Yeah, well, on the outside."

"Not even on the outside," Huck says, so softly that he hopes Jamie will miss it.

But he says, "Look pretty the same to me," and reaches out to brush Huck's hair back into its usual shape. "Sorry about, you know, hitting you."

"You shouldn't hit girls," Huck says, darkly, looking up into Jamie's face. Something moves there, glistens for a second: a minute crystalline formation of confusion, like Huck has said something he doesn't understand. Huck raises his eyebrows, more or less to himself. The snowflake of doubt in Jamie's eyes melts.

"See? You don't get it."

"Get _what_? You kind of a tomboy, okay. Kind of _exactly_ like Molly. That doesn't mean I can't think you're pretty."

"You think guys are pretty? How about Ricky Giffen, you think he's hot?"

"No-o, since I'm not gay."

"Yeah, really?"

"You're a _girl_, Huck. I don't know whether this has, like, escaped your attention for fifteen years."

"Yeah," Huck says, "_Really_?"

Jamie frowns, then raises a sarcastic eyebrow. "You have girlparts. You have, you know, breasts."

"Perceptive of you."

"Huck, what the hell?"

"It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right when you say it like that."

"Like what?"

"When you call me a girl. When you say you like me as a girl."

"That's what you _are_."

"Yeah?"

"You ... think you're really a _boy_?"

Huck stares at him, willing something stupid from his mouth to justify the rage of hate that his bubbling an inch from the close of his throat. He is surprised, afterwards, at what he says next.

"I'm not a girl."

"Are you ... are you a tranny?"

Huck, after he has swallowed on the brief impulse he has to punch Jamie in the face, says, "Maybe," softly. Though it is just one word and spoken quietly and without force, it tastes like steel between Huck's lips. It is a dare, as best he can make one. _I love you, but I won't let you do this_. He feels like crying, but he's damned if he will.

Jamie only says, "Huh."

"You got anything else to say?"

Jamie walks away, after a few moments of silence, hands raised in the air. His face looks to Huck like that of someone who has just absorbed the knowledge of the biggest lie he has yet uncovered in his life. Huck sees him the next day at school, in the distance in the halls. Some thin thread between them, black and fraying, snaps. Huck cuts math, slips out and sits in the cover of one of the big old trees in the grounds. He begins to run his fingers, knuckles, the tender skin on the back of his hands into the bark, over and over. It doesn't hurt -- the bark is not sharp enough to do much damage -- but if it had Huck doesn't think it would have registered. He wants to cry, but he can't make the tears come now.

*

The day that he walks in on Molly and her boyfriend -- his sister in a low-cut top and her torn old jeans, laughing in that way that Huck finds almost alien, the lipstick and eyeliner she is wearing very subtle but still glowing like a hot stone in Huck's belly -- is the day he runs away. Only for a day. Only as far as the mall, and the various places in D.C. where there are major bodies of water. Only as far as somewhere that he can forget who he is, but he runs there all the same.

Molly finds him. She runs out into the city to look for him, and because she understands him better than anyone else, she finds him. The thrift store on Georgia Avenue is big but she walks straight from the door to the place where Huck is standing, with a man's plaid shirt in his hands, and a new haircut, red around the eyes and sniffly at the nose. She buys the shirt for him, because he's scared that these dim wants he has so suddenly begun to act upon will be more clearly visible to the guy behind the counter. She smiles at the haircut -- sharp, very nearly brutal; the shortest his glossy black hair has ever been. She doesn't say what he's thinking: that mom will have a fit.

She walks with him outside into the street. She doesn't touch him. She rubs her lipstick away on the back of her hand. They go somewhere quiet and safe and outdoors because Huck manages a sentence to say that he can't go home because thinking about being inside, being in the house, is making him want to throw up. So they go to the park and find a tree and sit at the root. With his fingers disappearing in and out the plastic bag containing the plaid shirt Huck talks. Molly listens.

She holds him while he's crying, while he's hating himself for crying, while he's snotty and embarrassed and falling to pieces and still thinking, at the back of his head: stop making a jerk out of yourself, stop whatever this is -- fix it, put it back together; maybe the pieces will still hold.

Molly doesn't ask him what's wrong, and maybe she thinks it is all about her having a boyfriend now and a life that Huck isn't part of, and the familiar cold crack hairlining through his heart that always shows up whenever this happens. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last. But he always liked what she liked first: she's older and smarter and _Molly_, and even though they're twins it's always been an uneven deal, where she cares for him -- kicks the bullies and laughs at the fears; where her definitions are the ones which stick, and how, up until these swirling years, this lost time where Huck can't see himself as what he (_she_) should and can't grab hold of the alternative either, Molly's definitions have been fine.

But they aren't fine anymore.

She doesn't ask, because she doesn't need to, but he tells her anyway. The sound of his voice bounces off her silence and answers are suddenly easier to hear.

He talks about Google searches for 'transsexual' and 'FTM' that he deleted out of the history as soon as he was done and the books from Lambda Rising that he buried under school textbooks in his bag and that now live under his pillow in their room. He tells her that he cried the last time took a shower that lasted more than five minutes and that he wishes he could smash all the mirrors in the house so they wouldn't reflect this, this whoever-s/he-is. He tries to put words around how Toby -- his absence and presence, his silences and his mastery of words, his understanding, his quiet definition of masculinity -- makes him feel, but the words turn to dust in his mouth. Molly nods; that part she gets too, from another angle.

"I just ... don't feel right. I don't feel like a girl. I don't think I ever did."

"I know," she says. "I mean, I knew. I think."

"Be nice if you'd told me," he says, trying to smile.

"Yeah," she says, returning only the echo of his sadness. "Sorry."

"S'okay."

"Have to change your name."

"I like my name."

"You'll have to write a book about yourself then."

Huck laughs, properly this time. "Yeah."

"I'm sorry I didn't say anything. I didn't ... understand. I thought it was just, you know, _you_."

"Being weird?"

"Exactly."

"Well, it was. Sorta. Doesn't have to be a bad thing."

"I guess."

"I don't want to tell mom and dad."

Molly squeezes his hand. "No rush. Brother."

Huck smiles at her; she smiles back. They sit under the tree for a while and don't say anything at all. It's the first day he remembers that felt just about okay.

*

Molly cries, that first night. Confessions are heavy, wearing things. Her eyes feel tight and sore and her nose hurts from where she has blown it too many times. Her boyfriend was gone when they got back and she hasn't called him; it just wouldn't feel right to care what he thinks tonight. She waits until Huck has gone -- just to wash _his_ face and brush _his_ teeth before bed -- before she starts crying. She can't help feeling like she's gone wrong somewhere, like all the measurements of right and wrong and which way is up, all these measurements and all the calculations she's been making all her life, are suddenly out of true.

Huck has been so unhappy, and she didn't fix it. She didn't rescue _him_. She didn't keep that promise that she never made to anyone except herself: that she would keep her _brother_ safe; that was the first job, for always, for keeps.

And what does that make her? Just someone who failed to love perfectly. Just a person caught up in the orbit of their own world. Just a person. But knowing that -- in her head, with logic, with common sense -- doesn't make her heart stop hurting for him, for both of them. She's scared, tonight; with all the rules re-set and everything raw and uncomfortable and so horribly, utterly true, what is there left to hold on to?

What is she now, if her mirror is changing?

When she falls asleep finally she dreams about reflecting pools and trees so tall that neither of them ever reach the top. She dreams about Jamie Whitman, who she hasn't seen for ages now, since he moved away to Illinois last year. This time it's her falling out of the tree and Huck's there to catch her, and he is taller and broader and he looks like the old pictures of dad, before the White House and President Bartlet, when dad was skinny and hadn't grown his beard. But when he holds her hand their fingers, the shape of the nails and palms, the distribution of veins, the tone of the skin, is exactly the same. Like someone copied it, or Xeroxed them some limbs from the same mastercopy. Huck's strong. He's smiling. He is clearer, somehow; filled out to the edges.

In the morning, like she always does, Molly wakes up first. Their beds are still across the room from each other, though the room has filled out a little -- fuller of photographs (of Molly, far fewer of Huck) and good clothes, books that are dark and serious, and the small buzzing concentration of electronics in the centre of it all -- it is enough like it was when they were just little kids.

He is still sleeping, in that quiet, bound-in, almost sulky way he has and has had ever since they were tiny. If she yelled his name right now he wouldn't wake. Molly is a light sleeper but Huck could sleep through a hurricane. She has always figured this as the natural order of things -- the burden of being the eight-minutes-older twin, perpetually keeping the first watch.

*

Stephen wakes up with a jolt at the sound of two loud knocks on the door.

Molly, Huck's sister, his twin, who uses both her father _and_ her mother's surname because she is proud and fearless and filled out right to the edges of herself -- no spaces for doubt to grow in, is standing in the doorway of Huck's dorm room.

Stephen takes in a raised eyebrow and a startling sheet of oil-black hair and a face that so like and so absolutely unlike the one he has been sleeping beside for three months before he scrambles out of the bed, clutching at himself to make sure he is wearing something more than his skin and Huck's stories about him, whatever they might have been. His fingers find plaid boxer shorts gratefully.

Molly laughs. The sound stirs Huck: he groans and turns over and opens a single eye. Stephen looks at him and wants to grin, stupidly, because he's in love, and Huck's hair makes these amazing sculptural edifices overnight, and he's so fucking beautiful just lying there ... but then Stephen looks up and the smile, or what might have become a smile, falls off his face.

"And," Molly says, having watched him make the distance between terrified to lovestruck and back to terrified in the space of a minute, "We are done with 'hello'."

"She probably doesn't need you to get up and curtsey," Huck says, from the bed, half-turned into the pillow, sourly. "I don't think that would be improving to my sister's otherwise very humble personality at all."

"Oh shut up, Huck."

"'Consciousness to sarcasm in six seconds'," Stephen quotes, absently, staring at a spot on the carpet roughly three inches from the tips of Molly's shoes. "Which you kinda have to admire."

He looks up at her, tries for a smile. To his relief, she returns it.

"Not very impressive in our family," Molly says. "Really more genetics and years of training. And since Huck is the world's most utterly backward host, I will use my astonishing powers of deduction to guess that you're Stephen."

"That sentence was less impressive than I thought it would be," Huck says, from the pillow.

"Shut up, bro."

"Hi. Yes. I'm Steve," Stephen says, ignoring Huck -- or at any rate trying to -- and sticks out his hand.

Molly smiles: kind, and open in the way Huck only is very late at night or before he's really awake in the morning. She takes his hand, shakes it.

"It's nice to meet you," she says. "_Finally_." This last she directs at the shape in the bed, still unstirring.

"I was waiting to see if the world would end first," Huck mutters.

"And lucky you, it doesn't seem to have done. _Get up_ for god's sake!"

"Huck," Stephen says, whispers really. "Please?"

There is a long sigh from the bed, then an emergence -- the wave of hair, black brows and the sullenness of sleep. The covers fall away from him; all his features seem almost smudged to Stephen, bed-blurred.

But Stephen grins this time and whispers: "_Hey_."

Huck blinks, then opens his eyes properly. Then he smiles. "Morning."

Stephen feels the blush rising over his collarbones up as far as his jaw. "Morning."

"_Good morning_, brother. Except of course that it is -- " Molly glances at her watch, "Very nearly midday."

Huck turns his gaze away from Stephen, with what looks like reluctance. Then he grins again and says to his sister, "It would kill you to, you know, perhaps call me? Give me a warning, you know?"

"So what? So I wouldn't walk in on you and your boyfriend? Huck. You know you know better."

Stephen watches Molly cross the room and come to the bed, sit on the edge and lean over Huck, and kiss his cheek, then she passes her hand through his quiff.

"This thing actually is alive now, right?" she says.

They spend the day together, the three of them. And for Stephen the entire day is like looking in a clouded mirror. Molly is bright: with artifice and generosity, with her burning love for her brother. Stephen knows without being told that Molly was the defender when they were kids, the one that kicked the bullies (and he knows also in the absence of any concrete evidence that Huck had a coterie of bullies as a kid) and set the games and did the teasing and held the agency. And from the way Huck looks at his sister, the calm that rises in him like the bubbles on the surface of a glass of freshly poured milk, the way his voice is soft and even and expressive of nothing more or less than what is actually there, Stephen knows that Huck was happy to follow her, and be the darker, more obscure, twin.

 

vi.

"My dad nearly kicked me out when I told him I was gay," Stephen says, running his fingers through Huck's quiff. Huck kisses him -- the blank of his chest, just to the left of a nipple.

"My parents are good liberals," he says.

"I think he wanted grandkids. Or just for everything to be like it is on t.v."

"They didn't understand. Had to ease them into the gay part carefully. You know, after."

"How did they take it?"

"Bright-eyed, wanting to help. Molly did a lot of the actual campaigning. And explaining. And bulldozering over the top of the over-sensitivity."

Stephen chuckles, kisses the top of Huck's head. "I can imagine."

"But I don't think they actually got it. Can't blame them, I guess."

"Your dad didn't want a son?"

"I think it took my dad fifty years to come to terms with himself. And we don't ... talk. We kinda don't need to."

"Nothing's ever simple in your family, huh?"

"That could pretty much be our motto, yes."

*

One night close to his seventeenth birthday, Huck sits at the top of the stairs, like he did when he was a little kid; too scared to go downstairs and too much longing to be with them, mom or dad, alone or together, to go back up to bed. HIs parents are talking now. He does not want to hear it at all/he is desperate to hear it/he is blank and pale as wax. He is waiting to be poured into some kind of shape -- any one of a hundred or more defined emotional states -- and then wait again for the result, turn the mould inside out and see how well the casting took.

They are just talking. He is just listening.

"I wanted her -- " Huck's mother breaks off and curses under her breath. "_Him_, to be proud. You know, not scared of anything, be strong and brilliant like I knew they would be." Andrea sighs, trying to make the noise sound like a laugh. "Be a proud woman."

"Yeah."

"Pretty awful, right?"

"No," Toby says. "About what I'd expect."

Huck's mother laughs, or at any rate lets out another puff of air. "Thanks a bunch, Pokey."

"It doesn't mean anything, Andy. It doesn't make you ... "

He hesitates; she fills in the blank.

"A bad mother. Yeah. Maybe, maybe not."

"You're not a bad mother, Andrea," he says.

"I just wanted to send him out there strong and ready. Both of them." She laughs again. "I wanted to bring them up not to take crap from anyone, and know themselves, and to care and give help where it's needed and maybe get a little happiness on the way."

"You _did_. They will."

"I don't know, Toby."

"You want to throw a little blame at my gene pool again, then go ahead."

"No. I don't think so. Not this time."

He was trying to make a joke, but she just sounds sad. Huck looks down at his hands, feeling hot and red and horrible.

"They're twins, Andy, not the same person," his father says, in the voice he used to say goodnight in, when Huck was a girl who loved him painfully. "All that comes naturally to Molly. It never did to Huck."

"Yeah," his mother says, "I know."

"He'll figure it out, Andy."

The sound of a kiss -- travelling in the air like dust, like wartime secrets. His father's mouth brushing against his mother's cheek.

"I used to worry ... when they were babies. That he always clung on to Molly so hard. That he was afraid of something. That I wouldn't be able to fix it."

"He's fixing it himself."

Toby sounds so certain, no light leaking out of his faith because there are no cracks in it.

Andrea says, "Yeah," and then they are quiet for a while.

Huck wipes the tears away, angrily. He stares at a spot in the wallpaper for a while, lets the sound of their voices and the coldness in his feet and hands and all the justifications for his weakness just bleed away. And he does feel exsanguinated; fading in and out, watching the wallpaper shift from yellows and blues to greys and blacks and whites. He holds onto the stair rail tightly with one hand to stop himself tumbling down the stairs but can't stop his imagination doing the work for him: cracked skull and a broken neck, and nothing else; no name, no sex, no record, no trace. Until he wakes up with a jerk and realises that his head is leaning painfully against one of the stair rails and its ornate carvings are imprinting their pattern onto his skull.

They keep on talking.

"I feel like ... like I should have read up on this, _already_," Andrea says. "I'm _scared_, and I don't understand why."

"Probably natural."

A pause. A gathering of air. A sound like Huck's father clearing his throat.

"You're so calm," Huck's mom says, "Look at you."

"Yeah," Toby says. "I don't understand it either."

Then she does laugh, a little too loud, glassily.

"I realise," Huck's father says in a voice soft enough that Huck needs to strain in order to hear the right consonants, "That, historically speaking, this is not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from me, and I know you're going to have trouble with the basic concept because of this whole thing where you are compelled to control and direct everything in life -- "

"_Toby_."

"But I think you're just going to have to trust to God on this one," he says.

She doesn't answer; Huck imagines her, her face trying not to cry, or crumple, or scream. The way she looks when there is some report on the news about something cruel and hard, helpless but shivering with the desire to make right, all that adrenaline turning sour in her.

"He was unhappy. For almost twenty years. And he never told me, and he never told you. He took all that, by himself. My _son_." There is a pause, then the sound of Toby clearing his throat, a quiver over the noise. "He's _strong_, Andy."

"We can fix it, now," Andrea says. From where Huck is sitting it is not much more than a whisper.

"Give you something to fix," Toby says, and Huck thinks he must be smiling from the way the words sound, from the soft space they make in the air. "A dragon to slay, an injustice to right, And you're a happy gal."

"Shut up," Huck's mother says, probably smiling also.

"You don't have to be scared."

It could be either of them saying it, Huck can't make it out. He's falling asleep again. As he goes back towards his bedroom and gets back into his bed he thinks he hears footsteps on the stairs but the light stays on outside the door and everything is silent, and then he's too tired to keep on listening.

*

_This is one of the times I don't have any scruples about using influence to get what I want_ his mother had said and Huck had immediately wished she hadn't. Until that moment he hadn't considered the _other_ thing, the public face, the tricky questions, the op-ed pieces. The potential for shame and degradation and anger and desperate, protective pride when they've all had enough of that for a lifetime. Huck has a list in his head; the stuff the better-read bullies brought up, the stuff his parents argued about when they thought he and Molly were too young to understand, the things he has found buried in letters, the letter with the Seal of the President on it and his father's name in worn black ink. The things that have been particles of dark dust in the air of their family since before they were ever born. Huck imagines his own contributions to the darkness big enough to blot out the sun.

Molly had given most of the coming out speech. Huck mostly sat and concentrated on not crying, not freaking out, not running away -- because he thought that if he ran away at that moment, he'd never be able to come back, the shame would just choke him. So he sat and felt his skin contract around him, seemed to feel the air get thinner around his body, as though from this point onwards everything would be scrutiny; an endless freak show where he is the unloved star exhibit. He could _hear_ the voices in his father's head running over and over jokes he's made in the past, wondering if they broke another little piece of Huck's heart. Their eyes met but Huck couldn't stand the weight of Toby's gaze, always heavy, that day like lead and stone, sinking to the depths of Huck's stomach. His mother got up and hugged him, fiercely, her fingernails digging into his arms, and she whispered promises that Huck will never be able to erase from his skin, that made him feel guilty and strange and terribly loved, like he used to imagine a tiger cub might feel dangling from its mother's teeth.

But the silence around Toby did not shift, or dissipate. It writhes for some days in Huck's belly, physically painful, like a thousand dull needles. After he listens to their conversation on the stairs he thinks he will feel better but although the silence has been broken Huck still feels cast out, as though he has to earn this crazy emulation of masculinity he has yearned for, and all the harder now that it is not just a girl's dismissal of girlish things, now that it is a _pathology_, a sickness, a wrong thing at the end of a long line of wrong things. And now he must learn how to keep on being strong, like Toby said, when all he wants is for his father to hug him again. Huck cries because he has failed his father, and something between them that was meant to be forever has been broken; he broke it.

They get him in with a good psychologist who has some experience with gender dysphoria. Huck hates the guy at first sight. There are referrals to hospitals in Baltimore and clinics in New York. His mother walks around the city with him and that is when he remembers falling in love with the place again -- the streets and districts, the sky-brushing buildings, the shade of trees -- the city where this change will come; the new key for that locked and secret door in the centre of his heart.

For weeks it seems like he does not talk to his father at all. He plasters up the hurt, layers it under the more pressing demands of the psychologists and therapists and doctors and bureaucrats, his anger and anxiety, the strength he needs for denying every day that he is just plain crazy.

He is cleared, as expediently as his hormone panels allow (and with his mother's quiet push behind the sign-off) for T. The first injection is an anticlimax, just as he was warned it would be. Huck imagines a little field of stars erupting into his bloodstream, their light starting to go out as soon as they begin to shine. He flicks his fingernail against the vial of testosterone, listens to the clink, and for a while his world contracts around that sound.

They circle around each other: distant orbits, Huck and Toby.

*

"Are you ever going to talk to dad again, d'you think?" Molly asks from her side of their bedroom one night. It is the voice she uses to ask important questions: light, and sarcastic, turning something to ice in Huck's belly. "Only I ask because I don't think I've seen you talk to each other for about a month now. And I can't help thinking that's a bit weird."

"You should ask him."

"Yeah," she says, "I did."

"So?"

"He thinks you're not talking to him."

"_I'm_ not talking to _him_?"

"You're both stubborn and idiotic?" Molly says, brightly.

"You recused yourself from my defence team nice and quick there, Mol."

"He doesn't want to hurt you," she says, quietly. "You know what he's like. He's doing the blaming himself Ziegler tragedy fest thing. Again." She gets out of the bed, comes over to Huck's side of the room and sits beside him. "He feels responsible."

"Don't think they've discovered a way to apportion blame for this yet."

"Give him time."

Huck snorts softly. "Yeah."

"But, you know, frankly it's getting a bit old now. Mom and I want you to stop acting like such a pair of boys and make up. You know, maybe have a conversation. Or whatever weird telepathic thing it is that you two do instead of having a conversation."

Huck laughs then. He can't help it. He feels her smiling beside him. Their arms bump.

"See? Like that."

"I'm ... scared."

"Not man enough?" Molly says, poking him in the side with her sharp index finger nail.

"Actually, no."

"This is a masculinity thing, isn't it?"

"You're mocking me."

"Yes. I find it's the best way."

"Mol, c'mon, this is serious to me."

"It's serious to me! You have any idea what it's like when you two start sucking all the joy out of the house like this?"

"I haven't noticed you be noticeably less joyful."

"Well, I cover well."

Huck laughs again.

"It's _dad_, you idiot. He'll understand. If not through logic then through the mysteries of masculinity. Or whatever."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I'll talk to him. Or whatever."

"And I didn't even need to use violence or coercion. This is why I'm going places, bro."

"Never going to stop calling me that, are you?"

"Nope. Call it my payment for being your fantastically supportive and in all ways wonderful sister."

"Get off my bed?"

She kisses his cheek, then gets up. "If I must."

*

The next night, around eleven, Huck talks the longest walk of his life downstairs to the kitchen, where his father works late at night. The table has filled up with papers, the counter tops are covered with manuscript. A lamp, borrowed from the den, is sitting on top of a stack of worn looking books, one of which is the copy of the Constitution his father took to the White House with him. Toby sits behind this palace of paper, its distant king, tapping his pen against the surface of a legal pad. In the glare of the lamp his face looks older, his beard whitening in places that do not seem to show in ordinary daylight, his eyebrows still completely black. In the middle of a thought he is that blank man who is in all the photographs; the one Huck hardly recognises, because all the things that make up his father's face seem to disappear in the absence of movement; just a shell for those dark thoughts and approbations.

Huck swallows, then says, "Hey, dad."

Toby looks up. Dark eyes in a face made pale by the lamp. They are -- just sad, as they always are; tender in a way that makes something in Huck threaten to break; containing some kind of carefully wrought hope, soft and malleable, like silver, glinting in the centre of the blackness.

"Hey, kid."

"What're you doing?" Huck says.

Toby looks down at the paper, shrugs a little -- with his mouth and eyebrows more than his shoulders -- then looks back up at Huck.

"I don't even know anymore."

Huck smiles. "You want ... some coffee or something?"

"I'll make it," Toby says, getting up from his chair. "Sit there and read that top page and tell me what you think." He brushes past Huck, arms bare from where he has pushed his sweater sleeves up to his elbows. Their forearms touch -- catch and spark. They catch each other's eye, then look away again. Toby goes to the counter, gets two mugs down from the cupboard. Back turned to Huck, his voice rumbles out: "Don't sugar-coat it, son."

Huck swallows again, pushes back the near tears. "No, I won't."

*

The letter from Huck's shrink comes in late May, just after his twenty-first birthday. The preliminary appointment with the surgeon soon after. Huck hands it to Stephen with a long exhalation then sits beside him on the couch with his head resting on Stephen's shoulder.

"Wow," Stephen says. "Last steps."

"Yeah."

"Metaidoioplasty. Urethral lengthening -- man, need a better name for that. Oh no, gets better: scrotal construction. And removal of ovaries and uterus with vaginal closure. _Okay_."

"Do you get some perverse pleasure from reading all that out to me?"

"I just want to know what's going on," Stephen says.

"Do you have to actually _use_ the words though?" Huck says, miserably, hiding his face in Stephen's arm.

"I'll never say them again," Stephen says, kissing the top of Huck's head. "I promise."

"Not, as my dad would say, good out-loud words."

"Yeah."

"Makes me feel like a freak."

"No. Just a guy with some different anatomy going on. That's all."

"This isn't a magic cure, Steve."

"I know."

"Just another bunch of really painful surgeries."

"That you want. That you _need_."

"The need part is debatable. T and top surgery is enough for a lot of guys. I don't ... I don't know why I still don't feel ... " He sighs, the frustrated sigh he makes when he can't think of a phrase that is not what he calls 'hopelessly clichéd'. "_Right_."

"You get to decide. You're already a man, Huck. You're a man to me."

"It's probably good that we don't use you as a final arbiter in these things," he says, smiling up at Stephen.

"I just mean that I'm here for whatever you decide."

"I know."

"You want me to stop with the clichés now, don't you?"

"Please."

Stephen laughs. "You are so like your dad."

"People say that a lot."

"But it makes you proud, doesn't it? C'mon, I already know it does."

"Yeah, it does."

Stephen loops his fingers into Huck's hair, still the part he loves the best, pulls on it lightly, makes Huck's breath hiss through his teeth, then strokes the quiff back into its proper place gently. He kisses Huck's hairline.

"He was meant to have a son. You were always meant to be his boy."

"I don't believe in manifest destiny," Huck says, in between the meeting of their lips.

"Doesn't matter," Stephen says.

"Manifest destiny believes in me?"

"Something like that."

Huck smiles. Small, tired smile. "You'll get to meet him soon. My dad."

"Worried?"

"For you, yes."

"Huck."

"He makes me hurt," Huck says, quietly, "More than anyone else can. Like I can't fit everything I feel for him in my body. Like it's always straining out."

"I know."

"I don't know how to talk to him about this stuff. Like it goes against some kind of natural order." He laughs, cheerlessly. "I could write a poem about it, but we'd never have the conversation. Just too weird."

"I think that's both of you. Just how you do things."

"How d'you know so much about the both of us?"

"I listen."

Huck raises his eyebrows.

"You _talk_ about him."

"Do I?"

"Only since the day I met you, Huck."

"You brought him up that time!"

"But every time since, sweetheart," Stephen says, kissing him again. "I kinda figured that was important, somehow."

"Shut up."

Stephen laughs. "Before you even begin: I don't think you will ever be able to put words around how you feel about him, Huck. Until you, you know, write the Great American Novel and put the whole topic to bed."

"I suppose you're going to insist that you're not nervous about meeting this pivotal figure in my life?"

"Are you kidding? I'm terrified. But, you know, it's not the first time. I could pick the guy out of a line-up. I'm not threatened."

Huck laughs. "He's gonna love you. Though he will never admit it."

"That's actually fine with me."

Huck kisses him, gently, then not so. "He will love you," he says.

*

Toby arrives two days before the surgery date. He checks into a hotel a couple of blocks away from Stephen's place and calls round at lunchtime on the first day. The sound of the bell makes little ripples in the surface of the nervousness enveloping Huck's body. He gets up quickly, all his movements arhythmic, abrupt, and opens the door. Stephen, over Huck's shoulder, sees the same guy he remembers from the lecture: broad, heavy shoulders like the closing of a great bird's wings, dark curls spilling out over his collar, a beard with two white streaks spread down from his lip to his chin, and Huck's eyes. Everything short and anxious disappears from Huck when he gets a hold of his father. Their embrace is fluid, like a dance. Toby's fingers touch Huck's hair, tentatively; Huck's shirt has gone tight at the shoulders with the strain of throwing his arms all the way around Toby's chest.

Stephen watches them: his face hurting from the smile, feeling replaced, and full of joy, and fearful, and as though he is watching a moment he will never forget.

It is at least three times as terrifying as meeting Molly. Stephen almost flinches away from Toby's gaze; it feels so heavy. But, the same as before, he sticks out a hand.

"Hello, sir."

Toby smiles a weird, sarcastic smile. "That never gets any less strange."

"Dad," Huck says, everything in his voice from _i missed you so much_ to _don't you dare embarrass me_. Stephen blinks a little as he realises that they are loosely holding hands.

"You'd be Stephen," Toby says. It is not a question.

"It's good to meet you."

Toby raises his eyebrows briefly. His eyes glitter. It seems to Stephen that there are secrets in them. "Yeah. I'll ask you about that again in a few hours, shall I?"

*

"I'll be right here when you're done," Stephen says. "_We_ will be." Toby just nods, once; benediction.

Huck smiles at them, half-lost in the drugs. Then he closes his eyes. He feels a hand cover his forehead, for a moment, but it could be either of them. He opens his mouth to say something, but all the words seem unnecessary. He feels his thoughts slipping away, as if down a long dark corridor. He sleeps.

Huck dreams. In the dreams the bodies are whole, or at least no longer broken.


End file.
